Complete Atopia Chronicles

I shook my head. Samson, who had remained quiet, emerged smoothly from his hiding place in the thunderfall to take my hand, and we sat down together holding hands. I cried. Dad just left us there without saying another word.

My fascination with pain began very early. I can remember the rare moments when we would get passes to go above, and while my parents would sun themselves on the beach, I would hang at the edge of the palms and palmettos nearby.

At the fringes of the dark forest, I would summon little creatures to venture forth into my hands. Taking great care in their delicate capture, I’d stimshare into them to feel their squirming pain as I slowly pulled off their legs, one by one.

When all of their legs were gone, I would gradually squeeze them between my chubby fingers, flitting into them to feel their spasming agony, as I crushed their legless little bodies. Feeling the pain of killing these creatures helped me cleanse my own pain.

And perhaps, I enjoyed it a little too.

20

Identity: Bobby Baxter

“SID!” I YELLED out into our private emergency channels.

“Jesus, Bob, what?” he replied as his reality instantly merged with mine.

I watched him before me, engrossed in some data mining blitz as he searched through reams of multiverse worlds. Even with the storms threatening, he was still on the hunt for Willy’s body, his dozens of phantom hands dancing through the hypercontrol spaces around him.

“You know, if you play with your phantoms too much, you’ll grow hair on the palms of your hands,” I couldn’t help joking as I watched him and Vicious working their magic.

“No more Humungous Fungus this week, I’ve had enough, buddy.” They gave me several fingers. I silently watched them fiddle around some more.

“So what has your hair on fire?” he asked after a pause.

“No more Humungous Fungus for us, I agree,” I replied. “Something is seriously wrong with this place, and we are going to find out what.”

This stopped them in their tracks. Sid looked at me.

“Now you’re finally talking turkey.”

He cracked a smile.

“Sid, drop everything.”

All his phantoms immediately dropped to the ground.

“We’re getting the band back together.”

“Jimmy too?” asked Sid. Vicious was already shaking his head.

“No, I think we’d better let Jimmy sit this one out.”

Jimmy had bigger fish to fry right now. Not only that, but something about him made me very uneasy.

“But I’m going to ping him and tell him that we’re going to mount a search of our own, to try and help figure out the situation. That way we won’t raise any alarms if we scan the perimeter.”

I thought about that for a second.

“Plus, I want him to know what we’re doing.”

I wasn’t sure why. It was just intuition.

“Sure,” said Vicious carefully, “but just don’t tell him too much.”

That wasn’t a problem. I didn’t know too much.

“I think we should get Vince in on this too,” added Sid.

Nodding, I pinged Jimmy and shifted my primary subjective into a tight and secure channel space he immediately opened up to me.

Now I was sitting in a small, pristine white room at a white interview table. Jimmy was sitting before me, his hands clasped on the table, staring directly into my eyes.

“Did you find Wally yet?” said Jimmy as I fully arrived, cracking the faintest of smiles. “What’s going on? No surfing today?”

Identity: Jimmy Jones

“No,” replied Bob, “even I couldn’t handle what’s going on out there right now.”

That was the truth. The storms had converged, and the winds were beginning to tear at the forests as our beaches were pounded mercilessly by an angry ocean. Surface access would be shut off soon as we finished stowing everything and everyone below decks.

As we entered American territorial waters, their air force and navy had scrambled to surround us, battling their own way through the storms. Despite that we were close allies, the prospect of suddenly having a wholly independent country slide across the map to invade their space had raised some hackles, even if they understood we had absolutely no choice in the matter.

The world was already a dangerous enough place from their point of view, and they weren’t too happy about us invading their space. Of course, the prospect of two giant hurricanes simultaneously slamming into one of America’s most populated coasts had them occupied with their own typically belated emergency preparations.

Communications were strangely incoherent. It may have just been the storms, but we seemed to be getting contradictory diplomatic messages from one moment to the other.

And, of course, the storms were getting worse. As they neared the coast, and each other, they defied all physics and were gaining in strength, progressing into Category 5 and still intensifying. Unless we could do something about it, we would be beached on the continental shelf just south of Los Angeles, and the prospect of a fully energized fusion core running aground in America had raised the diplomatic tension bar just that much higher.